Quotes from Lyndall Gordon

Once The Evergreens and then the Homestead opened their doors to Mabel Todd, emotions—a lethal mix of passion, jealousy and rage—erupted during the last years of the poet's life, perpetuated by descendants and the authorities they co-opted or persuaded.

As Mabel inserts herself between husband and wife, and then between poet and 'Sister', and as a fissure in the family cracks and then breaks open early in 1885

The vulnerable image encouraged the pathos woven into her popularity. How the public loves wounded genius! How it loves her all the more if she be unmated, seething with love denied, an all-time poet unrecognised in her lifetime. But the Emily Dickinson who speaks through her letters makes no concession to helplessness.

This was a girl who could tell the difference between the page that perishes and the page that endures.

A wreath of white daisies from the Dickinson meadow were the only flowers allowed.

Austin's 'entire disappointment' in the marriage, and his entrapment, as a fly caught in a spider's web.

their voices too low to disturb the birds singing in the tall cherry trees.

It was her religion to make the best of everything.

reprieve of roses!

the fragrant pinewoods on one side of the road; a blueberry patch on the other. It was as though the positions of each plant and each cloud in the sky pierced her consciousness

This has been a story of the buried life after all: Emily and Austin and Vinnie firing up at the spark Mabel touched off when she flirted with Austin's buried passions and intruded on the Homestead and coveted the shadow-world of Sue and Emily. But to touch off that spark was Austin's doing as well as Mabel's. The feud was not wholly something that was done to the Dickinsons but was in some sense a sequel to what they were.

Obscuring the drama of Emily Dickinson's legacy have been the dustheaps of slander and sentimental conjecture that fortified the battlers in the war between the houses.

The only secret people keep is 'Immortality', Dickinson once said. Immortality is the mystery at the core of her story.

Mabel likened Lavinia's hand to a demented spider who has fallen into an inkwell.

In Maine during the summer of 1920 they rowed around Hog Island to the side facing the open ocean, and here he asked her to marry him. She was emotionally dead, she confessed. He didn't seem to mind.

The impact of rejection for a novice can be incalculable. It's common for the rejected never to try again, particularly women on their own or housewives or provincials who venture without support.

Austin required all reference to sickness be cut. Consistent with secrecy was the refusal of the Norcross sisters to let Todd see the letters in their possession. These remaining witnesses to Emily's ills in her teenage years, and to the treatment she endured in Boston in 1864 and 1865, shielded their cousin

how could the guardians of convention in the 1880s lend themselves to originality in a woman who was 'wayward'? Dickinson had not seen fit to follow the advice Higginson, with patient kindliness, had laid out for her over the course of twenty-five years.

reader's report by Arlo Bates, a poet favoured by the firm, noted Dickinson's 'crudity of workmanship'. He foresaw no possibility of making a stir but did concede that this was the real thing, a power near to genius. Had she published—had she learnt the conventions of punctuation and rhyme—'she would have stood at the head of American singers'.

The volume was a huge success, to the surprise of Houghton Mifflin who had rejected the poems, Niles who had grudgingly published them and the still rather offhand Austin. Five hundred copies of Poems were sold on the day of publication; the volume was reprinted eleven times in the first year; and the total sale, astonishing for a poet publishing a first collection, was almost eleven thousand copies.

Only when pressed did Mabel admit that they'd never met face to face. At most, she'd 'once' glimpsed her object 'flitting' away. 'Flitting' fits the legend of shyness, a shrinking creature, but the cutting edge of the Dickinson voice conveys the opposite: it's bared, at the ready.

So I keep bringing these — / Just as Night keeps fetching stars

In 1931 Mabel bought a carton of Roberts Brothers archives, which had been thrown out as waste paper for the mills but salvaged by a book hunter. The carton contained the whole of the Dickinson publishing papers, including the draft and final contracts in 1894.

Here another myth was imposed on the poet: this time, a tyrannical father.